As an iconoclast in my youth, and someone who was always attracted to big ideas, I developed a strong interest in evolutionary psychology—the idea that Darwin’s great theory could help explain human psychology and behavior. I knew that I was on to something when I gave my very first classroom presentation on this topic (in an undergraduate Sociology of Sex Roles class at Cal Poly); it caused such a stir that the professor went in for 3 hours of Gestalt Therapy afterwards. Now I always tell my students that if they can so fundamentally challenge their professors’ ideas that it sends them into therapy, then they are doing their jobs as creative thinkers and learners.

After graduating from Cal Poly, I pursued doctoral training in evolutionary and personality psychology at the University of Michigan, where I studied the mating behavior of college students. This early work, however, largely ignored developmental processes. I eventually became dissatisfied with this approach, underwent three years of postdoctoral training in developmental psychopathology at Vanderbilt University, and shifted from studying adult behavior to child and adolescent development.

In both my teaching and research, I emphasize biospsychosocial processes in fathers, parenting, and family stress and their effects on development and health. As the Norton Chair, my goal is collaboration and advancement of knowledge around a set of shared research questions in this area. To make sense of it all, I rely on evolutionary-developmental theory, which guides how I form hypotheses, aids in recognizing and integrating significant observations, and suggests lines of research to pursue (and avoid).

Areas of expertise:

Evolutionary-developmental psychology

Stress-health relationships

Impact of fathers and families on adolescent development

Timing of puberty

Neurobiological susceptibility to environmental influence

Adaptive individual differences

Research Focus:

As an overarching goal of my career, I seek to leverage knowledge from both evolutionary biology and developmental science to address core issues in developmental psychopathology, especially in relation to child and adolescent health. At one level, this involves theory development: advancing new models of how our biobehavioral systems respond to specific features of family environments and the larger ecological context. This work employs life history theory to model how these responses regulate stress-health relations over the life course. At another level, my work focuses on theory testing: examining the impact of fathers, family relationships, and socioecological conditions on children’s biological stress responses, timing of pubertal development, risky adolescent behavior and cognition, and related health outcomes. Although my research has shown replicable effects of families and ecological stress on these developmental outcomes, the size of these effects differ across individuals. That is, some children are more impacted by their rearing experiences than are others. Another focus of my research, therefore, is investigating differences between children in their neurobiological susceptibility to environmental influence.